I dunno... the combat scenes look incredibly fake, and that's a big problem for me in a movie like this.

What about them look fake to you? This is a big argument I've heard since CG has been prevalent and no one can ever explain why they look fake, just that they do.

Part of the problem might be that they look too sharp and clean.

Since the days of newsreels, people have associated grainy, poorly-focused, poorly-lighted and haphazardly-composed images with reality and realism. Battlestar Galactica used exactly these conventions to give its space-travel scenes verisimilitude. It also used a lot of handheld camera shots for the same reason, in the same way that cop shows like Homicide: Life on the Street have.

Our mental image of a World War II aerial battle is strongly influenced by the old newsreel and gun-camera footage we see in war documentaries. That looks "realistic" to us, even though it looks nothing like what the pilots actually saw. For similar reasons, I personally find it jarring whenever CGI is used to show things that a movie camera could not physically film.

To me, the stills and air-combat footage from this film look more like paintings or animation than "realistic" air battles. Even though personally, I've never seen a real-life aerial battle, even from a distance. Even if you could prove to me that these pictures were realistic as hell--and I'm not saying they are--they still wouldn't look "right."